Technologies

Pokemon Go: Is the Gold Bottle Cap Worth Buying a $20 Battle Pass?

The new item maxes out all of the IVs on one of your Pokemon. It’s the easiest way to get a perfect shiny Pokemon in the game.

I’ve been playing Pokemon Go since its release in 2016, and I’ve never caught a perfect shiny legendary. They’re absurdly rare, because you need to roll the right stats and the alternate pigmentation on the same Pokemon.

I suspect I’ll be seeing a lot more shiny legendary Pokemon with max stats (or shundos, as the community calls them) soon, though, since developer Niantic has released the first Gold Bottle Cap into Pokemon Go.

This powerful item lets you have total control over your Pokemon’s stats for the first time in the game’s history, but there are a couple nasty catches — the biggest one being that it’s locked behind an additional $20 battle pass, and you only have one week to complete it.

Is it worth it for you to buy that pass and grind out the tiers until you have that sweet Gold Bottle Cap? Here’s what you need to know about this hot commodity.

What is Pokemon Go’s Gold Bottle Cap?

The Gold Bottle Cap might be a new item in Pokemon Go, but it has made multiple appearances in mainline Pokemon games.

The first Gold Bottle Caps appeared in the Generation 7 games Sun and Moon, where they were used to max out all of a single Pokemon’s individual values (IVs). These IVs are hidden stats that are intrinsic to a Pokemon — you can manipulate them through breeding techniques, but the only way to change them on an already-generated Pokemon is through using the bottle caps.

The Gold Bottle Cap in Pokemon Go serves the same purpose as it does in the mainline games. This item will boost a single Pokemon’s Attack, Defense and HP IVs to 15 (the max value in Pokemon Go), assuming you’re able to complete the Hyper Training tasks the Gold Bottle Cap unlocks.

The current way to manipulate a Pokemon’s IVs in Pokemon Go is to trade it with a friend (and each Pokemon can only be traded once), so the Gold Bottle Cap is the only true guarantee that you’ll get a specific perfect Pokemon.

How to earn the Gold Bottle Cap in Pokemon Go

Currently, the only Gold Bottle Cap available to you in Pokemon Go is locked behind the final tier of a premium battle pass. Much like the Lucky Trinket gets locked behind the monthly Go Pass, the Gold Bottle Cap is the big draw of the special Go Fest 2025 Go Pass — so you’ll have to shell out cash and then put in the work to reach tier 100 in order to unlock this IV-maxing item.

Since this is only the first Gold Bottle Cap Pokemon Go players have had a chance to earn, it’s hard to say whether or not there will be alternative acquisition methods in the future. An item this absurdly powerful will definitely stay rare, just like the Master Ball.

If and when more Gold Bottle Caps are added to the game, it’d be a safe bet to assume they’ll remain out of reach of free-to-play players.

Is it worth it for you to buy the Ancients Recovered Go Pass?

The Ancients Recovered Go Pass is an event battle pass designed to run in tandem with Go Fest Global 2025. That means it’s extremely time limited — you can start making progress right now, but the whole battle pass will disappear after June 29. That means you have less than a week to knock out every tier.

You can earn a maximum of 10 tiers a day until June 28, and then the daily battle pass experience point limit will be uncapped. Essentially, if you don’t have a weekend to dedicate to playing Pokemon Go, there’s no way you’re going to unlock everything on this Go Pass (including the Gold Bottle Cap).

The pass also costs $20, which is a much steeper price than the $8 Niantic asks for in exchange for the monthly Go Pass.

Even if you make it to tier 100 of the event battle pass and unlock the Gold Bottle Cap, there are some strings attached to its usage. You can only use this item once, in order to boost a single Pokemon’s IVs — and if you don’t use your Gold Bottle Cap by July 6, it’ll simply disappear from your inventory. Tough luck.

You can’t use this item on Shadow Pokemon, and the Pokemon you want to use it on has to be your Good Buddy (or higher). If you don’t have a Pokemon already in mind to use the Gold Bottle Cap on, it’s probably not worth your time and money to invest in the pass.

Of course, if you are on the fence about whether or not to purchase this (very expensive) Go Pass, there are rewards on every other tier as well.

If you’re gunning for that Gold Bottle Cap tier, you’ll also pick up bonus experience points, lure modules, a lucky egg, an incense, an incubator and encounters with the legendary Pokemon Regirock, Regice, Registeel, Regieleki and Regidrago. You’ll also collect candy and candy XL for those legendaries.

If you progress the pass to the extra tiers past the Gold Bottle Cap, you can even earn upwards of 100,000 stardust — which goes far when it comes to powering up your Pokemon.

The value offered by the Gold Bottle Cap is completely subjective. Pokemon Go thrives off of FOMO — think about how long ago it was that Armored Mewtwo and the clone Pokemon from Pokemon: The First Movie last appeared in raids — but you shouldn’t feel compelled to buy into every new thing that gets added to the game. The difference between a couple IV points is negligible, and you can build a meta team of ‘mons without the Gold Bottle Cap.

Gold Bottle Cap FAQs

Technologies

Cloudflare Says Winter Olympics Cybersecurity Is at Risk in Spat With Italian Regulators

But Cloudflare’s global head of policy tells CNET the company is open to an agreement with Italy.

The CEO of the networking company Cloudflare is lashing out at Italy in response to regulatory anti-piracy fines, threatening to withdraw from the country and potentially the 2026 Winter Olympics.

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Italy announced on Jan. 8 that it had issued a fine of 14.2 million euros (approximately $16.5 million) against Cloudflare for failing to block access to pirated content. Soon after that, Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince took to X to call out the fines, describing Cloudflare’s decision not to comply as a fight over censorship. Prince said that complying with Italy’s demands under its Piracy Shield policies would affect content globally.

Italy’s Piracy Shield is a program implemented by the country’s telecommunications regulator, AGCOM. In order to cut down on piracy in the country, such as hosting illegal streams of sporting events, the program allows IP holders to report content violations to a rapid-response automated system. However, some have complained that the 30-minute window given is not enough time for ISPs to properly vet complains, and is resulting in legitimate, non-pirated content being blocked as well.

«In other words, Italy insists a shadowy, European media cabal should be able to dictate what is and is not allowed online,» Prince said.

Yesterday a quasi-judicial body in Italy fined @Cloudflare $17 million for failing to go along with their scheme to censor the Internet. The scheme, which even the EU has called concerning, required us within a mere 30 minutes of notification to fully censor from the Internet any… pic.twitter.com/qZf9UKEAY5

— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) January 9, 2026

In his posts, Prince specifically mentioned the 30-minute timeframe that Italy requires for Cloudflare to disable access to suspected piracy traffic.

«We block pirate streams every time we find one,» he wrote. «We hate them.» But, he said, «we can’t put in place a system where a shadowy cabal can require us to remove GLOBALLY anything they don’t like on the internet within 30 minutes. That’s insane.»

Some of the proponents of Italy’s piracy rules are soccer teams that want to prevent the illegal streaming of their matches.

Prince went on to list steps his company might take, including pulling its cybersecurity service from the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, removing Cloudflare servers from Italian cities and holding off on any plans to invest in the country. Prince also suggested he would get US government leaders involved, tagging Vice President JD Vance in his post. Prince also reposted a message addressed to the Italian prime minister, along with an article about Italy’s actions.

The Winter Olympics, scheduled to take place between Feb. 6 and Feb. 22 at sites across Lombardy and Northeast Italy, are a sensitive subject when it comes to cybersecurity, considering the potential that many may use VPN technology to view broadcasts of the event.

Door is open to an agreement, Cloudflare says

In an interview with CNET, a Cloudflare representative said that while the fine from Italy represents more than the company’s total revenue from the country, Cloudflare is still open to an agreement to avoid saying arrivederci to the country.

«We’re still evaluating, and we’re still open to working something out,» said Alyssa Starzak, Cloudflare’s deputy chief legal officer and global head of policy. «That would be a better solution. The hope is we can have some discussions for a more reasonable result.»

Starzak said the company has posted information and conducted outreach to Italian stakeholders about the ways Cloudflare is working to combat unauthorized streaming. But Italy’s law, she said, leaves no room for negotiation or nuance.

«It’s been very much a ‘You must do what we say’ » situation, she said.

Technologies

Transport Your Dungeons & Dragons Hero Off the Page With This Tabletop Gadget

At CES 2026, I found a couple ways that players and dungeon masters can use tech to upgrade their gameplaying experience.

As I walked around CES 2026, my eyes drifted over a poster awash with fantasy heroes, dastardly monsters and rolling dice — and I failed my saving throw to look away. If you’re a fellow tabletop gaming nerd, you might want to follow this pair of gadgets due out later this year.

Tabletop gaming continues to appeal to players with its deliberately analog gameplay, using miniatures, maps, dice and other physical trinkets to keep the focus on real-world play. The niche has grown in popularity over the decades, and a supporting industry has risen around it, offering third-party materials and accessories to enhance the experience. Digital gadgets and software have been added to this mix in recent years, and a new company, Arcalink, has its own supporting products for the avid Dungeons & Dragons player.

The first of Arcalink’s upcoming tabletop augmentations is a gadget that’s small but mighty. About the size of a film canister, the Arcalink One is a rectangular display around 2 to 3 inches long that’s covered in fantasy decorations. These can be swapped out, with one looking like a doorway in stone ruins and another appearing like a blue wizard’s portal (a third, not present but described to me, would look like a Mimic, the classic D&D monster that appears as a treasure chest to trick adventurers).

The Arcalink One’s screen shows a player’s avatar, and since it was built with the fantasy roleplaying game D&D in mind, animations for popular spells that can be triggered by voice commands. Tabletop RPGs encourage the theater of the mind, with players envisioning their characters through vocal descriptions, but the Arcalink One seems like a neat way for them to accessorize with a digital version of their hero (uploaded in JPG or MP4 file formats) that’s neither essential to play nor large enough to be obtrusive — a totemic treat to take from one game to another, swapping out character portraits by using the paired app.

The basilisk in the room is the price tag: the Arcalink One is expected to cost between $100 and $150, Arcalink founder Lizheng Liu told me. While the company hasn’t hashed out the final numbers, that first number is the device itself, and the high end of the range will bundle more of those clip-on decorations along with it.

Over $100 for an optional device is prohibitive for most tabletop players, but I imagine this would appeal to adventurers with deeper pockets who want a neat little plug-and-play gadget to bring more flair to the game table. Also, let’s not pretend tabletop fans aren’t already spending a good amount of money on accessories, dice and miniatures (looking at you, wargamers).

The company plans to let a select group of supporters start backing the Arcalink One in March or April, with a full Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign launching around June.

The second product, Arca Studio, is entirely digital: AI-powered software to help dungeon masters, the thankless gameplay managers who tell the story and give voice to their world’s denizens for their characters to experience. No, it’s not using generative AI to spit out campaign ideas — this AI software records your game sessions and will make it easy to go back and search for characters and plot events while planning ahead of your next game day.

Yes, this is a sort of gaming version of the AI summaries that productivity apps offer when, say, you’ve finished a video chat, but there are a few unique features tailored to tabletop gaming. One makes a word cloud grouping together recurring names and concepts in your campaign recordings to visualize the themes and frequent elements — great for dungeon masters to see which plot lines and adventure types they might be overusing to switch them up.

Arca Studio will launch around May or June and will be a subscription service, though Arcalink hasn’t decided on an expected monthly cost yet. It’s worth pointing out that anything could change in pricing or product features before these two products reach the market — and just like a good tabletop campaign, there might be some last-minute twists that change everything.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Tuesday, Jan. 13

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for Jan. 13.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? It features one of those annoying elements, where the puzzlemakers tie two clues together. In this case, you can’t really solve 4-Across and 7-Across separately, so you need to fill in the other answers to see these answers develop. Read on for all the answers. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.